9 June 2023

This year for the Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference I was able to work with my good friend and colleague, Scott DeJong. Scott does some really amazing work on disinformation while also designing board games (find his game, Lizards and Lies here: https://www.lizardsandlies.ca/). Naturally, as educational game designers, there are overlaps in our research and development activities. In particular, we have found that many educational games do not take full advantage of the unique affordances of board games and/or video games as a medium. As a result, we made a short video about our design experiences and how we deal with this (and similar) issues.

Discussing these ideas and later making the video with Scott was an amazing experience. At this point we consider the ideas to be in their early stages, but we hope to revisit this project soon and make a more polished version. Hopefully we will put something more together soon because these are ideas that I am interested in pursuing further.

16 May 2023

In this video I take a brief look at how Koei Tecmo defines “Japanese-styled” in their horror game series Fatal Frame. This was inspired by a quote from the series producer who referred to the most recent release in the series, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, as, “This extremely Japanese-styled title” when the game was being marketed in 2022. I trace Koei Tecmo’s definition of Japanese-ness through an analysis of other yūrei media and the narrative structures of the series. This research is in its early stages but I argue that Koei Tecmo connects to both historical and contemporary yūrei media in the Fatal Frame series and pose some questions about the significance of how Koei Tecmo defines Japanese-ness through Fatal Frame.

I decided to do something a little different for the International Conference on Games and Narrative 2023. While I did give a virtual talk at the conference, I also made a shorter video version of my presentation for my YouTube channel. Ideally, I would like to continue to do this for conference talks that I give that are either in-person or given “live” in a virtual conference format. I will continue to share video versions of my presentations from conferences and public talks that require video versions as well.

On the lighter side, I just wanted to note that I have really been enjoying the Fatal Frame games lately and I was very happy to get the chance to write about them for the first time. I am still mulling how exactly I want to approach my next large project, but I hope that I get to include some more analysis of the Fatal Frame games.

25 August 2022

I have been very excited to start a new, large-scale research project after completing my PhD and Post Doctoral Fellowship. While I am not at the point where I want to reveal the full scale of my research plan, I can say that I plan for it to include both traditional research and a new game project. As a first component of my project I have been engaging in research about Japanese Yōkai. I was excited to present the earliest parts of this research at the Replaying Japan 2022 conference (which used a hybrid model and was hosted by Ritsumeikan University).

This video examines Nioh 2 and its value as a cross-cultural learning tool. The video was inspired by my own experiences playing Nioh 2 before engaging in more formal Yōkai research afterwards. I found that many of the depictions of Yōkai were based upon traditional sources in both physical appearance and, in many regards, to how the player interacted with enemies during gameplay. This led me to think more deeply about the game as a cross-cultural teaching tool and, eventually, resulted in this video.

This was my most elaborate video project yet and took the most time to put together. This was mainly caused by my decision to synchronize the gameplay footage with the audio recording. I think that it makes for a better video but I may not have the luxury of editing a video like this again. Quite simply, it took a lot of time to capture the video, create transitions, take still photos of the art discussed, record the audio, and edit everything together. That said, I’m proud of how it turned out!

11 August 2021

I have been making progress on the translation version of Nagasaki Kitty with my writing partner Dr. Mimi Okabe. We recently released the pre-order for the game in time for our conference presentation at RePlaying Japan 2021 (hosted online by the University of Alberta). In our short video submission we discuss our motivations for making the game, American historiography, and our adventures in translation (in particular the dynamics of translating “meow”). We are continuing to make progress on the game and plan to start playtesting soon.

On another, semi-related note, I have been getting more practice making videos and I think that they are becoming higher quality. Post-pandemic, when we will presumably move away from remote conferences, I think that I will continue to make video versions of my talks so that they can be more easily disseminated (especially post-conference).

13 June 2021

An interesting by-product of the pandemic for me has been an increased amount of time spent learning new software and platforms. I was required to create a video essay version of my talk for the Canadian Game Studies Association and I enjoyed that experience. As a result, I made another video essay based on my International Conference on Games and Narrative 2021 talk. I am lacking in the proper equipment (i.e. microphone, lighting, etc.) so I think that the quality of the video may be slightly lacking, but I still had fun making it. The gameplay clips were captured on a PS4, the audio was recorded and edited using Audacity, and the editing and combing of files was completed using the Microsoft Photos application (which has pleasantly surprised me with its ease of use and number of features).

31 May 2021

I was extremely excited and honored to be able to discuss an important aspect of my research and methodology at the Canadian Game Studies annual 2021 conference. This was initially accepted as a paper for the 2020 conference and was a speculative paper intended to engage with how I was going to tackle my positionality within my dissertation. However, the 2020 conference was cancelled and all accepted papers were moved to the 2021 conference. As a result, this paper went from, “This is how I think that I will handle positionality within my dissertation” to, “This is how I handled positionality within my dissertation.” The fact that the 2021 conference was entirely virtual meant that I needed to record a video essay which can be found below.

I look forward to further engaging in this field and type of research in my future scholarship. In particular, I am becoming more and more interested in the idea of “erasure” both on the individual level but also at larger sites of power and within collective/cultural memory.